The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  For Bowen, in her review of Calder’s book, the historian is in danger of falling into the same tendency to over-generalise as the government propagandists fell into at the time. ‘We at least,’ she writes, ‘knew that we only half knew what we were doing.’ She suggests that a picture of the war should be presented not just in terms of the actualities, but in terms of the ‘mood, temper and climate’ of the time. This is a climate best accessed through individual stories and through the intense, often strange war-writing of individual writers. Describing her own wartime short stories, Bowen wrote that ‘through the particular, in wartime, I felt the high-voltage current of the general pass’.

  Taken together, Bowen’s statements can be seen as the impetus behind this book, which focuses on the lucidly abnormal particular stories of five writers in wartime London and post-war London, Ireland, Vienna and Berlin. In the process it attempts to tap into the high-voltage current of war, illuminating a ten-year period through the lives of five extraordinary individuals. The five writers are chosen for their own experiences and for their confluence in London in the Blitz. They were of different ages and nationalities and did not form a clear coterie in the manner of the First World War poets or of 1920s Bloomsbury. In a 1958 letter to her friend William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen looked back on her contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s as ‘the only non-groupy generation’. Nonetheless, she did acknowledge a shared social world. ‘What an agreeable life we all had, seeing each other without being a group,’ she wrote.

  By seeing each other without being a group, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were often in the same place at the same time, and shared friends, experiences and, at one remove, lovers. Before the war, Bowen had been the theatre critic for Night and Day, the short-lived magazine edited by Graham Greene; in 1949 she would correspond publicly with Greene in a series of letters called ‘Why do I Write?’ Bowen and Macaulay were close friends and were linked by their mutual friendship with Virginia Woolf. Bowen always attributed her initial success as a writer to Macaulay’s help in finding a publisher for her first stories. And Bowen and Yorke were linked by the incestuous love triangles which tessellated in literary London. After Bowen’s lover Goronwy Rees jilted her for the beautiful novelist Rosamond Lehmann in 1936, Lehmann herself found solace from Rees’s callous waywardness in Yorke’s arms.

  In his autobiography, Rosamond’s brother, the publisher John Lehmann (who at this stage was working with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press), described an ‘imaginary but nevertheless imaginable’ party, drawing together some of the people who drank pre-dinner cocktails in his flat during the war. He hoped in the process to produce ‘a composite picture that would illuminate the anatomy of our wartime society in the most truthful detail’. In this scene there are partygoers from the Ministry of Information, notably Graham Greene, ‘full of sardonic stories about muddle and maze-like confusion of action’; there are guests from the fire service – Stephen Spender, William Sansom and Henry Yorke, who tells ‘extraordinary stories of his fellow firemen’; at the other end of the room is Elizabeth Bowen, ‘in high spirits, radiating charm and vitality’; and then there is Rose Macaulay, ‘symbol of some dauntless, indomitable quality of moral and intellectual integrity in the pre-1914 generation’.

  Hilde Spiel is notably absent from this party. She did encounter Macaulay during the war, but this tended to be at gatherings organised by the PEN club rather than at more decadent parties. She was an enthusiastic reader of Bowen and Greene and would later translate both novelists into German. However she herself remained unknown to both of them in the 1940s, although the three almost crossed paths in Vienna in 1948. Spiel’s presence here acts as a counterpoint to the more exalted lives of the other four protagonists; a reminder of the gloomy and often horrific reality of the war years and of the fact that the main events of the war took place outside London. Exiled from her native Austria, Spiel was in the strange position of attempting to avoid bombs dropped by her former compatriots. Both she and her German husband Peter de Mendelssohn were attempting to resist their position as exiles, starting to publish fiction in English and insisting on their allegiance to Britain. But it was still hard to read about the gradual destruction of their homelands without ambivalence; and there were continual indications from the British that they did not quite belong. The sense of displacement was compounded by financial anxiety and by Spiel’s resentment that she had left behind a successful literary career in Vienna to become a housewife in suburban Wimbledon.

  It was only after the war that Spiel came into her own and that the roles of the five writers were reversed. Bowen, Greene and Yorke all had a good war but a bad peace. Spiel, on the other hand, had the most exciting time of her life in post-war Berlin and Vienna, where she was sent as an Allied press officer. The ruined European cities provided the setting for a new kind of ecstatic vitality. But, as she blacked out her windows on 26 September 1940, Spiel found it hard to be hopeful that life would ever dramatically improve or that she would feel fully at home anywhere again. For now it was Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke who could claim the territory of the blacked-out city as their own.

  See notes on Introduction

  Part I

  One Night in the Lives of Five Writers

  26 September 1940

  London 1940

  Newsreel

  By 26 September 1940 Londoners were gradually becoming accustomed to air raids. It was now clear that the war in Britain had finally begun after a year of false starts.

  When war was declared the previous September, the government and public prepared for the immediate bombing of London. Graham Greene and Henry Yorke were not unusual in hastily evacuating their wives and children to the countryside. Both men readied themselves for the deaths they thought could not be long in coming, with Greene drafting his will and Yorke writing his autobiography. Greene prepared for the raids by finding a builder to put plywood under his skylight to prevent broken glass falling inside; throughout London people queued up to have gas masks fitted and attempted to build shelters in their gardens. But these precautions proved premature. The first year of war came to be known as the ‘phoney war’ because the expected invasion and aerial bombardment failed to materialise. Away from home, the Battle of the Atlantic was playing out at sea, but in London it was a period characterised by anticlimactic waiting. By the late autumn of 1939, people had stopped carrying gas masks and there was a ban on recruiting any more ARP wardens.

  The war in Europe began in earnest in the spring of 1940. Germany invaded Norway and Denmark in April and the Low Countries and France in May. Allied forces were quickly cut off in Belgium and then evacuated from Dunkirk. The Germans next pushed further into France, occupying Paris by 14 June. This was an unexpectedly dramatic victory which isolated Britain and gave the Germans and other Axis powers an immediate advantage in Europe. On 18 June Winston Churchill, who had now succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, predicted the beginning of the Battle of Britain. Two weeks earlier he had vowed never to surrender, fighting on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills. Now he repeated that Britain would fight on, ‘if necessary for years, if necessary alone’, assuring the populace that they would look back on this as their finest hour. At this stage, people were expecting a full invasion. ‘The prospect of invasion of England no longer absurd,’ Hilde Spiel lamented in her diary after the Germans were victorious in Norway; ‘This would mean death.’ Official warnings blended with unofficial rumours suggesting that hundreds of German parachutists were about to land in Britain disguised as monks or nuns, with collapsible bicycles concealed beneath their habits.

  The Battle of Britain did materialise that summer, but at first London remained unharmed. There were small daylight raids on coastal towns in the south and east in June and July and then, when the British Foreign Secretary rejected a final offer of peace from Germany on 22 July, the Germans embarked on an air battle, intending to wipe out Britain’s air defences. Initi
ally the Luftwaffe engaged RAF fighter planes in aerial combat. Then in August they attempted to destroy Britain’s fighter defences, attacking airfields and radar stations. By the end of the month 1,333 people had been killed in raids. Nonetheless, these summer attacks were colloquially known as ‘nuisance raids’ and the British remained dismissive of their effects. ‘There are two corrections I want to make to current Nazi propaganda,’ the playwright J. B. Priestley informed the nation in a broadcast on 9 July:

  First air raids. There has been a great deal of German raiding lately, but the results, so far from being effective, either as regards military objectives or civilian morale, have been so negligible that the general opinion here has been that these raids can only have been feelers, attempts to discover where the best defences are located.

  The Nazis, he implied tauntingly, were not really trying.

  However, during the second half of August the German bombers moved progressively inland and began to incorporate the suburbs of London in their attacks. On the night of 18 August bombs fell in Croydon and in Wimbledon, where Hilde Spiel was living. On 22 August the first bombs fell in central London, giving Churchill an excuse to order an air attack on Berlin, which materialised on 25 August. Hitler in his turn used the bombing of Berlin as a pretext to command a more sustained attack on London. On 4 September he announced to the citizens of Germany that in England they were asking scornfully, ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ They would not have to wait much longer. ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ When the RAF dropped three or four thousand kilograms of bombs on Germany, Hitler boasted that the Luftwaffe would respond with several hundred thousand kilograms. ‘When they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground!’ Still defiant, Priestley boasted the next day that Londoners were going on as normal, despite the sirens. There were searchlights at night, making rapidly changing patterns in the sky, and ‘many-coloured flares blazing like sudden comets’. But it was surprising, on the whole, what little difference it made.

  He spoke too soon. On 7 September Göring declared that as a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin ‘the Führer has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire’. That night London suffered its first major attack. At five in the afternoon a swarm of planes flew in from Kent towards the London docks. By 6.30 much of the East End was on fire and the streets were strewn with fallen bricks and broken glass. Later on, heavy bombs landed in Chelsea and Victoria while others continued to destroy the East End. Looking back on that night, William Sansom recalled that:

  when the western skies had grown already dark the fierce red glow in the East stuck harshly fast and there was seen for the first time that black London roofscape silhouetted against what was to become a monotonously copper-orange sky.

  As a full-time auxiliary fireman, Henry Yorke was engaged in defending London from the start of the raids, risking his life night after night at the docks. ‘I’ve fought fires every night since Saturday,’ he wrote to Rosamond Lehmann on 11 September,

  have had three in one day and the two longest, Surrey Commercial Docks and St Paul’s, lasted 12 hours without a relief. The Docks one was the worst, bombed continuously from 9pm to 3am in the middle of a timber yard alight and completely out of control. I was lucky to get out.

  Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Rose Macaulay had longer to wait before they were directly involved, but by the third day of the Blitz the bombs were falling indiscriminately across London and no area seemed safe. ‘I hear little by little of the various bomb-damages in London,’ Macaulay told her sister on 8 September; ‘Hoxton again was badly hit, even streets in Kensington and round Paddington.’

  On 9 September, just around the corner from the area Greene was patrolling as an ARP warden, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury home in Mecklenburgh Square was hit by a high explosive (HE) and an unexploded bomb. Woolf went to London to survey the damage and found that the square was roped off to the public but she could peer in from behind. A house thirty yards away from theirs was completely ruined. ‘Scraps of cloth hanging to the bare walls at the side still standing,’ she reported; ‘A looking glass I think swinging. Like a tooth knocked out – a clean cut.’ The Woolfs started making urgent plans to move the Hogarth Press and all its equipment out of the house, but a week later the unexploded bomb exploded and the house and with it the Press was destroyed. ‘ “We have need of all our courage” are the words that come to the surface this morning; on hearing that all our windows are broken, ceilings down, and most of our china smashed,’ Woolf observed in her diary. Bowen and Macaulay, both close friends of Woolf’s, wrote to console her, terrified that their own homes would be next. ‘When your flat went did that mean all the things in it too?’ Bowen asked. ‘All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.’

  Churchill urged Londoners to remain resilient. ‘Hitler expects to terrorise and cow the people of this mighty city,’ he announced on the radio on 11 September. ‘Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners.’ But the heavy raids continued throughout September. Several stations and major buildings in London were hit in the first week of attacks: Somerset House, Whitehall, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace had all been struck by 15 September, though none of these was seriously damaged. Meanwhile houses and flats throughout London were destroyed by explosion and fire. Gradually people learnt to tell the difference between the sounds of HEs, incendiary bombs, parachute mines (dropped from aeroplanes to detonate at roof level) and defensive guns. Initially, the anti-aircraft guns in London were non-existent but by 10 September guns had been brought in from throughout Britain. Only one shell in 2,000 reached its target but morale improved now that London was heard to defend itself so noisily. William Sansom described how on 11 September guns started up from every side as soon as the enemy bombers came droning down, creating a ‘momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart’. There had been gunfire before, but nothing like this. ‘A violent medley of angry sounds, urgently accumulating like the barking of a pack of dogs, a rattling of pompoms and a booming of great naval guns.’ At this stage there were raids by both day and night but on 15 September the Germans started concentrating their attacks on the night-time, deterred from daytime sorties by heavy Luftwaffe losses.

  Politicians and journalists praised the resilience of Londoners engaged in defending their city. All the civil defence services were learning from experience and improving in efficiency and efficacy. Firemen now knew to keep the stirrup pump unlashed and to have water ready drawn. They had also become less fearful in dealing with fire. In a broadcast on 10 September, J. B. Priestley lauded the ARP services both for their organisation and for ‘the quality of service given by the men and women acting as air wardens, fire fighters, and as members of emergency squads’; this service could not be bought with money and sprang instead ‘out of a deep devotion to and love of this great city and its people’.

  But despite a widespread determination to resist the Germans and keep going, Londoners were becoming cumulatively exhausted by the succession of all-night raids. ‘To work or think was to ache,’ Bowen wrote in The Heat of the Day. ‘In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envisage sleep.’ Sleeplessness compounded anxiety. No one had any idea where the bombing would lead, or if London would end up flattened. ‘How fantastic life has become,’ Rose Macaulay wrote to her sister on 11 September. ‘I wonder if London will soon lie in ruins, like Warsaw and Rotterdam.’

  Increasingly involved in their local battle, Londoners became isolated from the war as it progressed in the outside world. William Sansom recalled how in this period ‘out in the wide world of the war’ Quisling had assumed power in Norway, Germany was extending
its power in Romania, and ominously Hitler met Mussolini on the Brenner. Britain itself was involved in raids on western Germany and naval engagements in the Atlantic. ‘But every night in the dark small world of London’s intimate streets these matters receded, and under the urging drone of the bombers, the weaving searchlights, the thunder of bombs and the crack of guns the moments became vivid and active.’ These were

  hot, cold, sharp, slow moments of intense being; moments that then extended themselves into hours, that brought with them the exhaustion of cold and sleeplessness, so that the total experience is most remembered as a curious double exposure of tensity and dullness.

  Each night of the Blitz was a self-contained moment in itself. And as darkness fell on the evening of 26 September, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke waited anxiously to see what this particular moment would involve.

  See notes on Newsreel

  1

  7 p.m.: Blackout

  The blackout on 26 September began officially at 7.26 p.m. It had been a cloudy day after weeks of unreal autumnal sunshine. When the sun did break through in the middle of the afternoon, the trees and lawns in the London parks appeared to Elizabeth Bowen to freeze in the horizontal light. For Bowen, the scene below her white stucco house seemed especially still because Regent’s Park itself was closed. She and her husband Alan Cameron were among only a few residents who had returned since the time bomb fell two weeks earlier. ‘Through the railings I watch dahlias blaze out their colour,’ she wrote in an article entitled ‘London, 1940’. ‘Leaves fill the empty deck-chairs; in the sunshine water-fowl, used to so much attention, mope round the unpeopled rim of the lake.’